Eleanor Lamb
here's to you 'cause you take what you give One-sentence summary: the very definition of post-traumatic stress disorder. Eleanor's powers are such that she's not likely to forget any of what she's endured till the day she dies, which will likely be never since she doesn't know how to remove the sea slug in her gut that's keeping her alive and the damned thing makes her functionally immortal. Her life up to her arrival in Xanadu was pretty much made of excessive trauma and probable cause to call Child Protective Services on her mother's skinny white ass, as well as a giant heaping spoonful of "WHAT THE FUCK WERE YOU PEOPLE THINKING" in regards to ... everything that couldn't be described by what was already said. make no excuses for the way we live She quite literally mentally latched onto a dead semi-homicidal maniac surgically sealed into a diving suit as the only justifiable father figure she could believe in; if this doesn't tell you everything you need to know about how fucked up her life is, I don't know what to say. For the first seven years of her life she was raised in near-complete isolation by a pedantic and obsessively neurotic altruist who dealt in absolute morality and believed in the ideal of a common moral law that people could be compelled to follow if you just worked at them hard enough. This, as you might guess, was not a very warm and loving household, though Sofia Lamb did at least express the belief that Eleanor was valuable to her. Nevertheless, Eleanor learned to be a naturally curious and perceptive tinybrat with a strong sense of self-righteousness. After the relative seclusion and innocence of her early years, however, life decided to throw Eleanor into the trauma end of the pool headfirst with no waterwings: in short order, her mother was thrown in prison for basically never shutting up and Eleanor was kidnapped and surgically experimented on to become a mostly-human thing called a "Little Sister" and subsequently brainwashed into being a merry little loopy monster child who only cared about two things: collecting and regurgitating the sea-slug-derived stem cells and genetic material affectionately codenamed ADAM ... and playing with her best buddy, a giant, homicidally protective hulk known as a Big Daddy, a fellow survivor of the experiments Eleanor underwent that left them chemically bonded to each other. You would be quite correct to suspect that the resulting psychological trauma all this induced in Eleanor left her a little ... flash-burned in the ethical and moral recognition department, what with basically having her brain rewritten, at least once, to be incapable of comprehending what "morals" even were beyond the most basic concept of "good" as "I should want to be good" and very little else. Whatever "ego" she possessed, whatever sense of self she carried, was almost wiped out by the experience - whoever she was as a Little Sister, it certainly wasn't Eleanor anymore. It's an experience that sent shock waves reverberating through Eleanor's psyche, and the fault lines are still there even now - she is simultaneously drawn to people who can promise her relief from the trauma of only having her own perceptions to rely on and violently repelled at the thought of letting anyone else determine her own destiny - whether she can consciously articulate them or not. She loved her Big Daddy (codenamed "Delta") very much. Obviously, this didn't leave her traumatized at all when, taking advantage of an internal civil war erupting between Rapture's various political factions, her mother escaped the prison she'd been trapped in, tracked Eleanor down, and used a Hypnotize plasmid to force Eleanor's Big Daddy to shoot himself right in front of her. No, not in the slightest. Of all the memories she retains, consciously or not, of being a Little Sister, she has never forgotten that moment - it was so formative it lodged itself in her brain and never left, not even after Sofia Lamb took her back to the labs in Persephone - once a penal colony, now Sofia's base of operations after the civil war ripped communications between sections of Rapture apart so thoroughly a place like Persephone was more or less completely isolated from the rest of the underwater city - and had the scientists she'd converted to her cause set to work attempting to undo the psychological damage the Little Sister brainwashing incurred on Eleanor. In fact, arguably the experience of having the scientists carefully and methodically knit back together (over a long and complicated process of trial and error that probably didn't damage her even further, no, never - but that did, eventually, help inadvertently lead to later breakthroughs in curing other Little Sisters) her ability to be a normal human being again with all the proper emotional responses and ability to make informed, coherent decisions only enhanced the trauma of that memory. On the other hand, it gave Eleanor the chance to comprehend she was a person again, as opposed to ... whatever the hell the Little Sisters think they are (which is definitely not "person"). She could think again. She could understand what it meant that she could laugh and cry and feel. Which is about when mommy started trying to indoctrinate Eleanor the old-fashioned way, by talking her to death. Among other things. while we try to ignore and we try to pretend To understand Eleanor's remarkable case of psychological detonation, we must first understand her mother (because, frankly, Delta isn't much of a character reference). Sofia Lamb was a dedicated and incredibly stubborn if not outright egotistical altruist: she believed in an absolute moral code, and equality for all under that moral code, and she was willing to take radical action to ensure they received it (and likewise to ensure they lived up to it). This, obviously, brought her into conflict with the laissez-faire ethos of Rapture's founder Andrew Ryan, especially when she started both publicly decrying his "everyone for themselves" guiding philosophy for Rapture and then mobilizing people to actively help others in response to Ryan's refusal to help anyone if they couldn't help themselves. A licensed and degreed psychiatrist, Sofia turned out to be more than capable of holding her own in the political arena, and her moralistic "preaching" - for though it was wholly secular, Lamb being no more theistic than Ryan, in the end, that's what it was; she had no moral qualms about manipulating those who responded to it as such and was perfectly fine letting others interpret it through the guise of religion if it meant they learned to do what she believed was right - converted an alarming number of Rapture citizens to her side. Too many for Ryan's tastes, in fact; with a growing tide of discontent forming between the haves - who Ryan's policy enabled to ruthlessly engage in any practice they saw fit so long as it turned a profit - and the have-nots - who were denied any capacity to defend themselves against those who profited from their disenfranchisement and kept perpetually suppressed - Ryan decided Sofia was too dangerous, and had her locked away in Persephone, even going as far as to wipe out any public record that she ever existed. The man was a political moron of the highest magnitude; he may have isolated her, but Sofia was a psychological mastermind, and trapped in Persephone with all the other rats Ryan wanted to keep locked away, Sofia had plenty of time to work on her sense of justifiable martyrdom - and convert nearly all the other prisoners to her beliefs. It was child's play, when the civil war broke out, for Sofia and her sizable mass of followers to overthrow the guards and take over Persephone; with whole sections of Rapture left blacked out in the aftermath and Ryan both obsessively fixated on stopping the popular terrorist named Atlas and disinterested in publicly revealing Persephone's existence, it was easy for Sofia to simply consolidate her power structure within the former penal colony and bide her time until everyone else fell. Except there was one problem. Someone had kidnapped her daughter. And whatever else Sofia felt about the child (she'd viewed it as a biological obligation to further humanity, but Eleanor was inevitably little more than a duty she felt called upon to perform; she even took advantage of Rapture's state of the art in vitro facilities and simply selected a biological donor, rather than bother with a sexual act she personally found distasteful), Eleanor was hers. So, Sofia left Persephone, very matter-of-factly tracked Eleanor down, killed the Big Daddy trying to protect her in the most satisfying way possible, and set the scientists she'd persuaded to her cause to work repairing the damage done. However, such a sizable investment of time and effort on Eleanor's behalf would have to be repaid to society by Eleanor eventually, and so Sofia set herself to work devising a proper way for Eleanor to make up the debt she owed to the coalition that had begun referring to themselves, collectively, as the Family. A year later, Andrew Ryan and Atlas were both dead, punished for their sins by the fruit of their labors, leaving Rapture leaderless for the first time in over a decade ... and suddenly, Sofia had all the time in the world to put her plans into action. our conversation isn't so loaded What Sofia eventually decided was that Eleanor would become the living repository of the collective knowledge and power of the Family, a - in her words - "true Utopian", dedicated selflessly to the common good and with no ambitions of her own, only existing to fulfill the desires of her Family and armed with all the insights and awareness and strength that could be implanted into her to make those common desires be realized. This was not a spur of the moment decision; Sofia had already attempted to bring this idealized vision to fruition once before, and found herself stymied by the problems of that much implantation of ADAM into a single human being - eventually, the unstable stem cells that made up ADAM's spectacular ability to rewrite the human genome would overwhelm the "normal" human cells and leave the test subject's cell structure in a state of constant mutation and entropic decay, and they would become so wracked with pain they'd be driven mad. Mad and, consequently, useless. But the Little Sisters, being symbiotically linked to the sea slugs that produced ADAM and capable of repairing damaged cells instantly, were functionally immune to splicing's degenerative effects - and so the scientists' failure to remove the sea slug from Eleanor's digestive system instead became an unintentional success. Eleanor, it seemed, was the most suitable candidate for the fulfillment of Sofia's - and, from her perspective, the Family's - long-held Utopian dream. Eleanor, of course, rebelled, which only led to Sofia locking her in quarantine, isolating Eleanor from everyone but herself (as she believed, justifiably as it turned out, that Eleanor would not be psychologically capable of lifting an arm in anger against her) and conducting the splicing treatments personally, calmly and patiently enduring her daughter's disobedience and never relenting in her tireless explanations of the good Eleanor would do - for everyone. Eleanor might have been so traumatized by her own experiences outside of her mother's grasp that she couldn't find the strength to cope with a direct rebellion, but she was more than damaged enough to explore the wide world of the passive-aggressive, and unknown to Sofia, the splicing experiments had already given her one incredible advantage in that regard: she'd learned how to use the chemical bond that had once bound her to Delta to bond with the new Little Sisters her mother found it necessary to create to harvest enough ADAM for the Family's continued survival in Rapture's extended twilight. And once she realized her mother's plans included finding a way to wipe out such pesky complications for her "Utopian" as "free will" and "self-identification" - well, she was desperate enough to try something stupid: so she decided to put her fellow Sisters to the task of something far more ambitious than simple mischief and questions. She was going to bring her father back to life. when you're done competing (we'll be waiting) Hilariously enough, Subject Delta was not just the closest thing she'd ever known to a real father, he actually was her anonymous and unrecognized biological father; among other genetic samples taken from the man he used to be before the surgeries and psychological tampering and chemical doping turned him into a lumbering subhuman beast whose only want in life was to keep his assigned Little Sister safe was a squidge of baby batter, and this anonymous sperm donation went into the gene bank along with the others; it was pure coincidence Sofia Lamb chose Delta's unwilling contribution to Rapture's eugenics program as the best candidate for her eventual child, and pure coincidence that later Subject Delta would successfully bond with his own biological daughter - although in retrospect, the biological link may have been the key to why the genetic tampering and pheromone manipulation Rapture's scientists had spent so long working on finally produced a success. Perhaps there was a reason they were the first true Big Daddy/Little Sister bond, but biological factors weren't the only cause; they certainly weren't the last one, after all. Delta was a part of the Alpha series of Big Daddy - a trial run, an unfinished prototype, and genetically unstable. The first Big Daddies were also among the first splicers, taken from the test subjects used to ascertain the stem cells' effects; it left them prone to psychosis and difficult to control, and the psychological conditioning necessary to twist their brains into the necessary mental pretzels that made them such fierce protectors also damaged their cognitive function - leaving them the ability to splice gave the Big Daddies too many options - it ruined their ability to make clear decisions in a confrontation, especially with the added need to protect their pair-bonded Little Sister. In fact, in the cases before Delta, the bonding failed so spectacularly the few Alpha series subjects involved had to be restrained and locked away after killing the Little Sisters they were meant to protect - it left them with a hardwired psychological need to have a Sister to protect, but incapable of bonding with any of them, and the mental conflict this caused left them homicidally insane and filled with perverse hatred for the Sisters instead. Later Big Daddies were culled from subjects who hadn't had the chance to splice themselves first. Many of the scientists weren't used to working with human test subjects without moral restrictions - they made errors. Eleanor didn't. In the months it took her to convince the other Little Sisters to go along with her plan, she took the substantial scientific and strategic insights her mother had already begun implanting her with and filtered them through her own desperate desires and decided that once she had enough genetic material and enough influence over the Little Sisters that she could give them complex instruction and expect them to carry it out she was not just going to bring Subject Delta back to life, she was going to return his full cognitive abilities - she couldn't return him to normal physically, in the end, and she couldn't restore his past; she couldn't return any of what he'd lost, but she could replace what he'd lost - she could rebuild the fried pathways in his brain that the Big Daddy treatment had left scarred and unusable - she could give him back his humanity, and give him a fresh start on being a person. She reasoned that leaving him (mostly) a blank slate would also provide her with a moral control to compare against the endless doctrinal rants inflicted upon her by her mother; she had by that point become so worn down by her mother's incessant moralizing that even though she personally found her mother's ideals rotten and hypocritical she had no way to argue against them except her own inner resistance - there was no one left in Rapture who could question Sofia Lamb's moral authority - and so there was no one to give Eleanor any hope that her resistance was morally just, when faced with the knowledge that everyone else believed in her mother's "lies". She believed - she hoped - that Delta's freedom from her mother's psychological stranglehold over the rest of Rapture would lead him to choose differently, and by his example she could convince herself resisting her mother's will was a justifiable moral choice. After all, he was her Big Daddy, her protector, the one who she was psychologically conditioned to believe would always be on her side, the closest thing to a father she'd ever known and the only adult figure in her life who'd never willingly betrayed her - he was the only one capable of fighting the picture of parenthood her mother had provided for her as "morally just" - she couldn't accept that he'd have less than her best interests at heart. So she brought him back to life and more or less turned him loose. Surprisingly, she may have actually saved (what was left of) her sanity in the process. when your heart stops beating (we'll be waiting right here) So now this is where the rest of the plot goes. Oh my god this entry is getting so hideous :x switch hands to the hand that can feed SPLICING FOR FUN AND PROFIT, or, WHAT HAS SCIENCE DONE: the stuff Eleanor's got at her disposal and what that means for ~*~you~*~. Not actually terribly relevant, except perhaps for consistency's sake. Plasmids and gene tonics are referred to here, for clarity's sake, by the names they were sold under by Fontaine Futuristics and Ryan Industries; blame them, and 1950s advertisement ideology, for the ridiculous titles, as the cheesy 1950s-ness was definitely intentional. we need more Eleanor has no intention of using most of her plasmids except perhaps Telekinesis, Teleport, and Scout because she's lazy and nosy as fuck; they're just all very noisy and violent and their usage would imply she's spoiling for a fight she just plain fucking isn't interested in. She ran away to Xanadu so she could take the time to figure out the rest of her life in peace, she's not here to antagonize people. On the other hand, Eleanor is Frankenstein Jesus and she has a lot of terrifying things lurking in her genetic code that could probably eat most anyone stupid enough to make her want to interfere with other people's day-to-day, rather than be a tiny passive-aggressive lunatic at them about it. Plasmids are just the ones that look the coolest - and the ones she has to consciously activate, because plasmids are like wrenches: pretty useful within their range of function, but utterly unsuited for everything else. And they kind of hurt like a motherfucker to activate, even for someone with a sea slug in her gut that lets her regenerate just about anything. You see, to get technical for a minute, the temporary and near-instantaneous genetic rewrite an active plasmid forces on the user's cell structure often causes a dramatic and obvious visible manifestation in and around the hands of the user that lasts for the duration of the activation period, at which point it rewrites the user's genetic code again to more or less erase the physical effects of its active form and returns to its passive, "dormant" state. This hurts. A lot. A good comparison is that immediately after using a plasmid, your hands feel like your stomach would if you'd just been dropkicked by a 300-pound wrestler wearing combat boots. In a normal user, the buildup of stress and pain caused by such constant revision of their genetic code would eventually overwhelm their body's ability to cope and it would leave their bodies unstable and wracked with so much constant pain they'd go insane from the experience. It probably says some seriously fucked up things about Eleanor that she almost wishes this was a problem she'd ever have to deal with. Almost. * Telekinesis - desc goes here * Hypnotize - desc goes here * Incinerate! - desc goes here * Electro Bolt - desc goes here * Winter Blast - desc goes here * Insect Swarm - COVERED IN BEES (no, really). * Decoy - desc goes here * Scout - desc goes here * Teleport - desc goes here than memories Gene tonics are semipermanent genetic enhancements along the lines of modern-day steroids, only more ... esoteric, you might say, taking advantage of ADAM's near-limitless potential to take the basic idea to extensive and near-supernatural heights their contemporaries viewed as firmly in the realm of science fantasy. They are only somewhat less terrifying than plasmids in terms of immediately apparent effects but much more terrifying on a long-term basis - and present in much smaller quantities in Eleanor's system than the more easily-obtainable (read: easily stolen and stockpiled in the Little Sister vents where Sofia couldn't find them) plasmids. Eleanor was deliberately kept not actually very physically impressive (Sofia Lamb wasn't entirely sane by the end of it all, but she wasn't unobservant either) and most of the gene tonics Fontaine Futuristics and Ryan Industries invented were physical enhancements - not to mention that from Sofia's perspective, and Sofia had final say, many of them were unnecessary in light of Eleanor's regenerative abilities. The effects caused by the tonics Eleanor has can be consciously interrupted if she feels like it because Eleanor, what conscious control she does have over her own genetic code is mildly worrying; otherwise, like the steroids with which they share an evolutionary root, they're "always on". * Natural Camouflage - desc goes here * Fountain of Youth - desc goes here ghosts love in the way they please (but don't we all) * Teddy Daniels - she and Teddy are the best of PTSD buddies, you betcher ass. you aren't the ones who fascinate us * Kate Heightmeyer - HELLO, NICE PSYCHIATRIST LADY, I PROMISE YOU DON'T REMIND ME OF MY MOTHER. not enough time not enough time * the dead weather, old mary * radiohead, reckoner * okkervil river, blanket and crib * pretty girls make graves, the grandmother wolf * the xx, crystalised * passion pit, moth's wings * baroness, the sweetest curse * !!!, bend over beethoven * mabel mercer, down in the depths to clear the smoke from your eyes Bioshock 2 by 2K Marin, based off Bioshock by Irrational Games = not mine, Flambeau by WolfesClothing = not mine, Samantha Krutzfeldt's adorable face = definitely not mine, lyrics to Pretty Girls Make Graves' "The Grandmother Wolf" also = not mine, I have far too much time on my hands and I definitely own that part of this whole entry. Category:Living Category:Characters